The real perversion of justice by way of modern American racism is that black people in Ferguson – like black people in the greater St Louis metropolitan area and nationally – are marginalized economically and physically from day one. That is the real looting of Ferguson.

In America, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic,“White flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors.” But that engineering was perfected in St Louis, which Al Jazeera reported “has spent enormous sums of public money to spatially reinforce human segregation patterns”.

In Ferguson this weekend, after echoing other politicians’ calls for residents to stop looting, Rev Jesse Jackson told me:

The real looting is legal looting. People don’t have their fair share of police jobs, fire jobs, accounting work, legal work. That’s looting. The looting by night – should not take place, but neither should the accepted level of legal looting. And that must stop.

The National Guard rolled in to town on Monday, and its presence will essentially protect that legal looting of black people – much as it was protected when Missouri became the last slave state admitted to the union.

But when I hear the founder of the Rainbow Coalition and the first black president of the United States call for a stop to illegal looting that “undermines ... justice”, I wonder: Why do they care? Why should any black person care about the storefronts of Ferguson? Or care about the business life of a community where almost half of young men are locked out of the workforce – and where, if they get a criminal record while unemployed, they will effectively be locked out from employment forever?

It’s not like the “best” stores of Ferguson – the McDonald’s or the Walgreen’s, for instance – provide much more than minimum wage jobs, barely helpful for subsistence living. The dollar stores pedaling cheap goods and unhealthy food that no one needs aren’t much better. And it’s undeniable that the worst of Ferguson’s businesses – the many legal loan sharks who blight its streets – are actively strangling the last breaths from Ferguson’s black residents who are already on the margins.

Will looting solve any of this? No. But will bringing in the National Guard to protect the very loan sharks and fast food restaurants who are exploiting us? Hell no! And let’s face it: fear of these businesses getting destroyed is what’s bringing the troops in, not big-picture concerns about the legal looting of human lives. Racism, looting Missouri since crackers owned slaves, lit Ferguson on fire – not some looter with a firecracker.

Too often, a call for non-violence becomes a blanket excuse to do nothing and maintain the status quo. The National Guard is coming in to maintain the status quo and that is unacceptable – because black Missourians, like most African Americans, were already drowning in the status quo when Mike Brown was still alive.

Ferguson was a community ‘asleep at the wheel,’ with residents largely not bothering to vote, often because they did not believe elections would change anything. Michael Brown’s death has changed all that

The killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson has sparked violent confrontations and shattered any illusions of racial harmony in Barack Obama’s US. As the standoff continues, Jon Swaine reports on the deep grievances fuelling the protests